Non-standard reasoning services for the verification of DAML+OIL ontologies

Abstract

Ontology has a pivot role in the development of Semantic Web which provides the understanding of various domains that can be communicated between people and applications. Motivated by J. S. Dong's work, we propose a new approach to interpreting DAML+OIL in a lightweight modeling language for software design, Alloy, which is used to provide a non-standard reasoning service for the verification of DAML+OIL ontologies. To do so, Jena is first used to parse ontology documents into classes, properties and statements, next we use algorithms to translate them into Alloy model, the Alloy Analyzer is then used to check and reason about such model. The experiments show that our method greatly improves J. S. Dong's work, and distinguishes from the traditional ontology reasoners in property checking and reasoning. © 2010 IFIP.